insearchofbud

One thing follows another.

December 6, 2015

Sunday:  I’m in the basement of First Congregational Church in Billings, Montana. A woman named Terri just bought a children’s book of Crow Tribal children’s stories about the Old Coyote.  I had wondered who would buy it.  I suspected she might.  She struck me as the kind of woman who had some inkling about cross-cultural things.

She is White and her teenage son is African American.  They are both Americans, of course.  Members of our church.

I looked for kazoos at the dollar store.  I don’t know the actual name of the store, but everything in it costs, you know, a buck.  I think there were two kinds of people in the store.  I represented one kind.  I simply wanted to find some kazoos and I didn’t know where else to look.  The other kind were short of cash and visited the dollar store to shop for bargains.  I tried to pick people out as belonging to one group or another.  I thought that perhaps the young man who had held the door for me belonged in group two.  People starting out in life tended to be short of cash.  I remembered that we had been short of cash for years.  We needed cash the most when we had it the least.  Now it is the other way around.

December 7, 2015

Monday:  I suddenly remembered that I still needed kazoos.  I shouted the question at work, in the pharmacy.  “Where can I buy a kazoo?”  Meredith, the woman in the narcotics cage, recommended that I go to Rimrock Mall to a vile store near Dillards.

I did, after work.  In the store, a young man who needed to be coached in how to use the till sold me the kazoos, so I was good.  I took the kazoos to Russell Rowland’s house.

Writing workshop, however, was vaguely unsatisfying.  Oh, the stories were good, some were even great.  The stories people told us verbally were the best.  Finally, what was most satisfying was the story that a member of our group, an Irish/Crow woman, told us.

Her mother had boldly stood up to a white farmer who had defiantly raised a wheat crop on her land after the lease expired.  You could tell the memory pained our fellow writer.  The racism.  The sexism.  However, the woman’s mother prevailed.

“She stood up to the man!” cried Rick.  The woman’s mother “gave the finger to the man,”  Rick exulted.  [cheers]

December 6, 2015

My ideal story would go something like this:  A boy grew to be the child of enlightened parents who knew how to help him develop his finest, most human, qualities:  intelligence, scholarship, physical strength, wisdom, kindness, grace, friendliness, good will, courage, loyalty, and a sense of humor.  His attributes were many more than that.

Then when he was about 14 he entered puberty and he was attracted to the girls his age.  He masturbated often.  He had embarrassing erections, but his parents counseled him to apply himself to his studies and athletics.

Were they crazy?  They must have been.  He joined his peers in the pleasures of the flesh:  alcohol, marijuana, loud thunderous music, sexual adventures, rebellion, freedom.  His parents no longer approved of his doings.  Hell, they didn’t know his doings. Not a clue.

Lost and on his own, he joined the circus to make his way in the world.  Circus life was harsh.  A man he worked for boasted of shooting vulnerable people.  After being arrested for stealing food, he found out that the girl he loved had run away with another.  He felt depressed.

Sad, in jail, broken, alone.  Then homeless.  The lesson for him was that the street is a strict master.  He learned the street rules.

Bit by bit, his personhood returned.  He found succor in the folk magic, available to everyone, practiced by the homeless people of his day.  He learned to eat at the Rescue Mission, to sleep in doorways, to keep his possessions in a shopping cart that he parked in front of the doorway, like a gate to protect himself.  Death was no longer a stranger; he witnessed a man get his throat slit by a coward who was afraid to ask for money.  This memory gave him nightmares and fits of tearfulness.  For years to come.

Eventually love and life returned to this brave soul.  Although he wanted to return to the life of debauchery, he could not.  Instead, he became a parent, then a grandparent to a 16-year-old lover of other 16-year-olds.  The beat goes on.

That is a version of my ideal story.

Jack and I can be pretty good friends, if I let him watch Donald Duck.

December 5, 2015

P. asked me, “Did you drink a whole bottle of champaign last night?”  My face felt hot, so I buried it deeper into the pillow.  “Becky and I shared it.”  She had maybe one glass, I thought.  “I didn’t think you liked champaign,” she said.  “Sometimes I do.”

I had trouble going back to sleep.  A bit after seven a.m., so I rolled out of bed and went to the kitchen.  I have to walk carefully around our bed because there isn’t much room.  Kitchen floor felt warm except for that one strip near the stove where there’s a foundation wall below.  Icy there.  I had to pee.

I usually hold my water while I do the things I think are most important.  You know, like take my meds.  When I took my two antidepressants and one blood pressure pill I said a prayer to ask the medicine, Please work!  I fixed coffee.  I took out the copper basket with the grounds and drummed it back and forth against the inside walls of the garbage can. ‘baddabaddabadda.’  Then I tossed the remains of last night’s pot and rinsed, then…you know the routine.  I often wonder as I’m rinsing the copper basket if I should run hot or cold water.  I’ve heard cold is better.  Maybe hot water would cause any grease in the pipe to adhere to the coffee grounds.  Just a theory.

Finally while the coffee started its dribble into the pot I relieved my bladder.

I took P. a cup of coffee to our bed.  She opened an eye, smiled, thanked me, sat up.

Later this morning, we went for a Christmas tree with our niece Becky and her four-year-old son Jack.  Becky had asked last night if we could take some pictures with the Rolleiflex that she could then develop herself.  Her older sister Ruth had done just that maybe 20 years ago.  Anyhow, I think it’s good to use the camera.  To keep it limber.  To keep its shutter and winding mechanism working.  Plus, the basement darkroom is in shape now that my nephew and I rebuilt it.

“Are you going to dress him cute, or what?” I asked Becky on the way to the nursery.  She knew I was trying to be funny so she didn’t answer me.  I looked back at Jack.  “You know, cute shoes.”  P. said he was already wearing cute shoes.  You know, kids super hero tennies with velcro strips.

Becky’s idea was that she had wanted me to take some pictures at the nursery while we were buying the tree.  She said she wanted one of him pulling the tree off the lot.  “Way cute,” she said.

Well, we got to the nursery, but Jack didn’t want to wear his cute black peacoat.  P. and I went into the nursery office.  I walked through the nursery flower bed.  Soon Jack walked in with his mom, looking cute.

Then he didn’t want to go out to the yard with us to select a tree.  Then he didn’t want his picture taken.  Pleading, cajoling, begging, trickery:  they all failed to get him to cooperate.  Then he hid his face.  Well, I did shoot some film.  He was far away, or moving, wearing a frown, once in a while he had a faint smile.  Becky asked Jack to be more fun.

Isn’t that how things often go?

The tree we bought, a subalpine fir, was four feet high, just right for Jack.  While I put the camera away, I heard Becky say, “Oh, that’s so cute!”  Yes, Jack was grinning.  He had hung a little cloth snowman on one of the limbs.

My boss, a lady of uncertain years, said I could come in to work today.

“Can I just come in, like, whenever I want?  Whenever I get up?” I asked.  She assured me that would be just fine.  (I’m retired, you know.  I want to help out.)  All of the pharmacists and technicians at the pharmacy, except one, are pretty much new, still in training.  Some have diplomas or licenses, but most are technicians in training.  One of my best friends, another pharmacist, just started working there.

The old lady is retiring at the end of this month.  I figure we are doomed.

I’m a pharmacist.  I dispense medicine.  We provide prescriptions to the residents of about a dozen nursing homes and assisted living places.

Our technicians reduce the doctors’ orders into standard prescriptions on a computer, then a pharmacist (like me) approves their work.  Or rejects it and asks them to redo.  There are a bunch of ways a technician can do it wrong.  We don’t make an issue of it, we just fix it.

After that, when a label peels off a printer, another of our technicians puts the medicine into some sort of blister-pack card to send to a nurse at the nursing facility in order to pop the pill out and give it to the poor soul who lives there.  My sympathy goes to him.  Or her.

Some of those people are younger than I am.  Others are older than my Uncle Bud would be, had he survived WW II.  Makes me think.

But I was glad to go to work today.  You alert and faithful readers know that I have been struggling with depression and anxiety.  I take medicine under a physician’s care and I have been visiting the YMCA to work out regularly.  I try to go every day.  So far I have missed just twice.

What am I anxious about?  Oh, let me count the ways.

I worry about my antidepressant medication.  I went without a couple of weeks ago when my internist changed them and I was miserable.  I felt like death.  I thought about death.  I found the thoughts of death frightening, even though I love all of my family and friends way, WAY too much to ever want to die and leave them behind.  I am not afraid to die, but I love my peeps.  I walked with the suicide prevention group each year for many years.  I have excellent insight into my illness.  Nonetheless, depression is terrifying.  It’s the pain of depression that scares me.  And the anxiety.

Anxiety.  What am I anxious about?  My family members.  My friends.  People I love who are far away, hundreds of miles.  People I love whose spouses are getting to be elderly.  I am anxious that something bad could happen to them.  Illness could happen.  I feel physically ill, almost, worrying.

I care about the people at work, at church.  At my writing workshop.  At the places I volunteer.  The theater.  The child care.  An anxious person, like me, can worry about just about anything.  I am afraid for those who would be left behind if a loved one died.  Somebody like my old friends, I mean my really old friends, the ones who have married even older people.  I love them, I worry.  But, like a medical director I once had, said:  That’s what I have.  Depression.  Anxiety.

Yesterday evening at 5:30 I walked into my kitchen as the answering device finished recording.  I heard a message from Big Sky Psychiatric inviting me to call them for an appointment.  I called them immediately.  I got an answering service.  The psychiatrist’s office would open Friday morning at 8.  I called Friday morning at 8:10.  I got the answering service.  A woman told me that the psychiatrist’s office doesn’t take calls on Friday, but she would give them a message and ask them to call me.  I left a message.  But they didn’t call me. How soon will I get in to see a psychiatrist?  My hunch is, not for a long, long time.

Welcome to the reality of psychiatric accessibility in Billings, Montana, in 2015.

I was expected this, so I left a message for my internist’s nurse because I have an appointment with him Monday.  I was going to ask if I still needed to see him, in light of possibly seeing the psychiatrist.  But I got no return call from Jennifer.  This was unprecedented.  However, until now, I have not been a psychiatric patient, as such.  I feel I have been stigmatized.

Now I feel like a proverbial turd in a punchbowl becauseI have a diagnosed psychiatric illness.

Again, please do not worry about me.  Sympathy or empathy is welcome.  I am safe.  The problem is simply that depression is painful. Also, even in this modern age, psychiatric illnesses carry a stigma.

Today I was phone solicitor for one of our community theaters.  Only had 10 people, or so, to call.  My share of the list.  I’m not good at it, but I had a script to follow.  And courage.

By today I had called each of prospect at least once, and one, a dude named Tom, promised to donate money.   Then yesterday the woman who directed when I sang in the chorus of “Oklahoma!” about 25 years ago also promised to send some.  I mean, my call went to voice mail and I had hung up, and she phoned me back.  We talked several minutes.

Then this morning an angry woman told me to take her name off the list.  Wow, that hurt.  I sat stunned, nursing my sore ego.  Talked to myself.

Hurt, I walked the two blocks to the YMCA to work out.

Then, while returning home, I encountered one of my neighbors, the one who put a rubber bib on his cat.  Turns out he has lots of cats, many with bibs.

I could hardly contain myself.  Just a couple days ago I had planned to Google cat bibs to learn what they were supposed to do.

He said he put the “bird bib” on his cats to slow them down, to reduce bird predation.

This neighbor who, for the past 30 years had been reserved, became more animated and talkative.  Here’s the problem:  Cats caught birds, injured same, then put wounded birds in house that caused untoward scene.  Bothered his wife.  Neighbor then had unpleasant chore of killing the injured birds.

The bibs come in two sizes, he said.

One thing follows another.

December 2, 2015

Surprised me today:  I woke about 9, then took a bath and read part of Russell Rowland’s novel, “The Watershed Years.”  My reaction:  Wow, he is good at telling about the lives of those who ranched in Southeastern Montana before World War II.  It was almost flawless.  Almost without cliche.  Dialog was true to life.  Content had plenty of surprises.  Situations realistic.  Hero, well, heroic.  I will keep reading.  Russell’s novel is damned good.

I decided that I will never write anything to equal Russell Rowland’s work.  However, I may hire me an editor!  My stuff will be different.

P. surprised me at noon when she came home from work to find me back in bed, attempting to fall asleep.  I was wet, hot, having just gotten out of the tub, having just been reading Russell Rowland’s book.

She came into the bedroom, said, “What the Hell?”  Then she walked out. That’s why I love her so much!

I got up, got dressed in yesterday’s clothing.  She offered, and I ate, half her turkey and halvarta sandwich.  Or was it ham?  Certainly was dry.  Came from Luckies.  I drank coffee with it.  Or milk.  Or nothing.  I don’t remember.

By then I felt strong, so we took the BMW back to Jerry at Metric Wrench.  Couple of problems.  P. met me there with the other car.  I got in with her.

Then P. drove me to NOVA theater.  I gave Dodie a $200 donation and an invoice for a wool carpet I bought in Istanbul.  She gave me a photograph that my daughter-in-law bought from NOVA last Fall at auction.  I took the framed photograph to Kinko’s and had them package and mail it.  The surprise there was how cheap it was to send it.  I emphasized to the young man that I didn’t want it to arrive in Duluth broken.

P. and I felt well, so we drove to the post office to apply for renewals on our passports.  We were required to each make out a check for the amount of the renewal fee.  We didn’t have any checks, so we took home the papers to fill out.  We filled them out and put them away to submit later.

We still felt fine, so we went home and ate left over spaghetti.  Then we both went to the YMCA to work out.  I am less fit, so I worked out for 30 minutes.  Well, okay.  Twenty-five minutes.  I went home.  Bathed.  P. showed up at home soon after because she worked out for a longer time.

…n 2011 at Lakeside, Montana.  None has the Bonde name because Carl’s only son, Carl R. Bonde, Jr., died near the end of WW II.

In trying to extract every available smidgeon of information about my late Uncle Carl, I often wonder, Hey!  How will I know when I’ve gotten all I can get?

I won’t.  My late mother’s younger brother remains enigmatic.  He died in 1944 in the English Channel.  Killed by a U-Boat torpedo.

I stare at his image in his basic training photograph.  Does he look like me?  Not that much.  He has full lips like I do.  His hair might look like mine, kind of, but his was curly, mine straight.  He had some sort of pimple on his chin.  He had that pimple (possibly a sebaceous cyst?)  in all his pictures, except his high school senior photograph.  I suspect it was removed from his school photo at the studio by retouching.

I know about retouching.  I used to study the photos of my high school classmates in the year books.  I graduated from Beaverhead County High School and the annual was called “The Beaver.”  The joke was that we boys really loved “The Beaver.”

You could see the retouching in “The Beaver,” done more or less expertly.

Perhaps 10 years ago my nephew gave me a professional grade studio retouching set.

The set consisted of a kind of machine, about the size of a box of beer, that has an illuminated translucent disk and magnetic ring for holding the negative in position.  A binocular magnifying lens was enabled the artist to do fine work.  It also had some sort of vibrating mechanism the frequency of which was adjustable with a dial.  The idea is that one could hold the negative onto the lit surface with the magnetic ring then, using a pencil specially sharpened to a fine point, to put tiny dots on the emulsion side of the film.  The vibrations helped to control the size and number of dots. One used softer pencil leads to make darker dots.

Zits and other blemishes show up as dark spots on a print, as in the photo of my Uncle, above.  Therefore, on the negative, the zits look like clear areas, not dark.  All one needs to do is fill the clear areas with little graphite dots to make them the same gray as the surrounding complexion.

I still have the retouching set.  I still use the film camera to make photographic copies of old images for my friends, mostly tribal types on the two nearby reservations.  Takes me about a year per photograph,  but I keep after it.  The retouching set is mostly useful as a magnifying apparatus to judge the sharpness of negatives.

What I remember most vividly about the book that accompanied the retouching machine, was the insistence that “grouch lines,” on the image of an older person, must be left intact.  I believe those lines would be between the eyes, at the bridge of the nose.  Other wrinkles, such as an old lady might want removed from her cheeks, could be obliterated by retouching.

The electric wire to the flash lamp cuts across the lower right corner.  Mike is on an Army cot.  The twin bed came from Kalispell with our Grandmother when she moved to Missoula.  The window behind Mike is the one the grown-ups claimed I used to crawl out of to serenade the girl next door with “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” wearing just my slippers.  A lie, of course.